Fallout Online

» see fallout-on-line.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In April 2007 Bethesda paid $5,750,000 for the Fallout intellectual property and deliberately left one piece on the table. Interplay kept the right to build a Fallout MMO, on terms: raise thirty million dollars in financing, and be in full development by April 2009 with a shipping game inside four years of that. Interplay had tried to sell the whole thing for fifty million with the MMO included. Bethesda bought everything except the MMO, which tells you what it expected to happen.

My own time with this genre ran on Ultima Online, on Turkish private servers, which is a completely different economy from a licensed western MMO with a subscription attached. By 2010, when the project finally got a public name, I was twenty-six and past the age where I would sign up for four years of somebody's evenings. That turned out not to matter. Nobody was ever in the market for this one, because it never reached a state where a market was possible.

What did exist was a design. Dialogue writer Mark O'Green later described a world running down the American west coast, opening with a disaster that would keep generating further disasters for as long as the servers ran, and one planned storyline that sent players backward in time into scenes from the earlier games. The map was supposedly 65,500 square miles.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

Interplay started pre-production in November 2007 and hired Jason D. Anderson, who had worked on the original Fallout, to direct. He wanted the tone of the 1997 game and the look of Hard Boiled, the retrofuturist comic. The contract required Bethesda to approve design documents, and according to Anderson, Bethesda simply did not respond to the requests. He came to believe there was never any intention of letting the game move, and left for inXile in March 2009.

On 3 April 2009, two days before the contractual deadline to be in full-scale development, Interplay announced a partnership with Masthead Studios in Bulgaria, which had an engine from its own game Earthrise. Bethesda did not accept that this constituted development and filed to take the rights back. When it sued in September 2009, it attached Interplay's own SEC filing showing the company was $2.54 million in debt with sixteen thousand dollars in cash.

~ the funny part ~

Brian Fargo had the idea in the late 1990s after seeing a GameSpot poll saying players wanted a Fallout MMO. He pitched it to Feargus Urquhart at Black Isle, who turned it down on the grounds that Interplay could not afford it, which was correct. Tim Cain, who had made the original Fallout, warned the internal division that a multiplayer game in a single-player series was a questionable idea, then pointed out that Fallout Online carried the acronym F.O.O.L.

The 2006 SEC filing is the best document in the story. Interplay told the market the game would cost seventy-five million dollars and ship in July 2010, then bring in $160 million a year from its second year onward. The company had not released a game in two years when it wrote that. When the teaser site finally appeared in 2010, Andy Chalk at The Escapist said Fallout Online was obviously going to tower over World of Warcraft, since the only way it could exist by then was divine intervention.

~ what got buried with it ~

Bethesda lost most of the individual rounds. Its preliminary injunction was denied in December 2009. Its restraining order against Masthead was denied in September 2011, the judge noting it had sat on the alleged infringement for seven months before asking for emergency relief, and the appeal was denied that October. It won anyway, because Interplay was a company with sixteen thousand dollars in the bank and Bethesda was not. The two settled on 9 January 2012. The game was canceled and the MMO rights reverted, each side paid its own lawyers, Bethesda handed Interplay two million dollars, and Interplay kept the right to sell the old Fallout games until the last day of 2013.

Interplay tried briefly to turn the assets into a single-player game and raised a few thousand dollars, which ended that. Bethesda released Fallout 76 in 2018, an online Fallout made by the company that had spent five years in court establishing that only it could. The screenshot everybody has seen of Fallout Online, a figure standing on a broken road under toppled poles, leaked during the 2011 trial. It is a courtroom exhibit, which is the most honest thing about the whole project.

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